Meantime the lovely young girl of whom we have spoken, all unknown to the young soldier, was dancing and singing the hours away. One day her young friends said to her, “Josephine, come with us to Euphemia, the old mulatto woman, and have your fortune told.” Josephine was not superstitious, but still she held out her pretty hand to the old witch, who examined it with great care, and, it is said, told her exactly what really happened to her in after life. The gay Josephine only laughed and tossed her bright head, saying, “Who promises so much, only creates distrust,” and went back to her cottage home, quite unmoved at the prospect of “becoming the wife of a man who would one day rule the world.” If you ask me how the old Corsican herdsman, or how the old mulatto woman in Martinique, knew what should befall Josephine and Napoleon, I answer, “More than likely, the prophecies, like all rumors, grew by repetition, and were mainly filled out after these things had actually happened; because no sensible person ever believes that a human hand is allowed to draw aside the curtain behind which God has wisely hidden mysteries so great.” Josephine was young and happy; why should she wish to be “great”? The old mulatto woman might chatter all day; she did not chirp one sweet note the less. Unlike Napoleon, she disliked study. Her mother, Madame Tascher, used to threaten her with a convent if she did not skip less and study more. “My good and pretty child,” she would say to her, “your heart is excellent, but your head—ah, what a head! I must send you away from home to France, among companions who, knowing more than yourself, will show you how ignorant you are.” All this, Madame said very seriously and coldly, for she saw that it was high time something was done. Then she left her daughter to think it over.
To be found fault with, and threatened! That, indeed, was something new to the petted child. She began crying in good earnest, so that her servant women came running, to see what was the matter. Not being able, as usual, to comfort her, they cried too, till the noise reached the ears of her father, who was very fond of her. Now I am about to tell you a secret. The truth was, it was not the idea of hard study which frightened this pretty young lady, when her mother spoke of sending her to France; but the idea of separation from a little boy-lover about ten years old, named William K. I don’t wonder you laugh; the idea is funny; but you must remember that a little Creole girl and boy, are as old at ten, as a boy and girl of sixteen in our cold climate. Well, this is all about it. Listen: William’s parents had come to Martinique to live, in consequence of the misfortunes of the unhappy Prince Edward, whose banner they followed. Arriving at Martinique, a friendship had sprung up between the two families, and there Josephine and William had been promised by their parents to each other, when they should be old enough. Now you know why the little girl-wife that was to be, cried so hard at the idea of being sent away from Martinique. Well, the very first chance my little lady had, she told her dear William what her mother had threatened to do. Then William ran, crying, to his mother, about Josephine’s being sent away to France, and teased her to go to Josephine’s mother, and beg her not to afflict her dear boy William so cruelly; and that the child had actually fallen sick of a fever in consequence, raving continually for “Josephine,” and begging his mother to hide her from every eye, lest he should “lose his little promised wife.” After a while, what with his mother’s comforting words, he grew better, and William’s teacher being chosen for Josephine’s teacher, that young lady suddenly took to study with a vigor which astonished everybody, except William himself, who had his own reasons for not being surprised. Suffice it to say, she drew well, learned to play both the harp and piano, and was making great progress in the English language. For a time all went on happily and well. But one evil day for Josephine, William’s father found it necessary to leave Martinique for England, with his family, to claim some property which had been left him. Now, it was true that he had to leave on business; but it was also true, that both the parents of the children had changed their minds about the marriage of the little lovers. Now, I agree with you that this was very cruel, after promising them to each other; but the fact was, in plain black and white, that each loved money and position, better than the happiness of these young people; however, they did not want a fuss, so they kept quiet, and said nothing to the children about all that; they merely separated them; and each was to suppose, after many anxious days and months, spent in waiting for letters, that the other was forgotten. It was too bad—I am quite angry about it myself; a promise is a promise, and just as binding when made to a child, as to a grown person; and more, too, because children are so trusting, that it is a greater shame to deceive them. So William went to England with his father, and Josephine wandered round the beautiful island, carving his name on the trees, and saying to herself each day, now, to-day, I shall certainly hear from him! Surely, to-morrow, I shall have a letter! Meantime the beautiful Maria Tascher, Josephine’s elder sister, was taken very sick. All that love and skill could do for her, was of no avail. She died. After this, poor Josephine grew more sad than ever. She never smiled now, or put roses in her hair, or danced with her young companions; but sighed—oh, such deep sighs for such a young thing—and grew almost as pale as the dead Maria.
It is very strange, but Josephine could talk much more freely with her father than she could with her mother. So, when he questioned her one day as to her unhappiness, she told him all. Now, Monsieur Tascher loved his daughter after a fashion, but, as I told you, he loved money better; and what do you think was his answer to the poor girl, who was so broken-hearted about her lover, and so sad without the company of her dear, dead sister? Why, he told her, that now that her sister was dead, she (Josephine) must marry the gentleman whom her sister was engaged to marry, had she lived. Monsieur Beauharnais was his name. Then the little Creole cried till her eyes were half blind. In vain she told him that she had promised William to marry none but him. Her father replied, that in marrying M. Beauharnais, she would make the best match in Martinique, but, as to William, he would never be a rich man. Josephine still kept on crying. At last he told her a wicked fib: that since William had gone to England, he had quite forgotten her. He did not tell her, though, that Josephine’s mother had in her possession twenty letters, which he had written to his dear little wife, and which they had purposely kept from her. Well, Josephine was spirited as well as loving, and when her father told her that William had forgotten her, she said to herself, It is very true; he has never written me one line. Then she shook the tears from her beautiful eyes, as the rough wind shakes the dew-drops from the rose, and holding up her flushed face to the bright sunlight, said, proudly, “Marry me to whom you like; I will obey.” For all that, she walked more than ever under the trees where they used to sit, and never once did she carve the name of M. Beauharnais on her favorite trees.
Now, Josephine had an aunt in Paris named Madame Renardin, who was constantly writing to Madame Tascher to come to Paris with Josephine, that the marriage might more easily be brought about. But Madame Tascher was very fond of her own beautiful island, and replied to Madame Renardin, Ah, it is very easy to make Paris look fine, when I am two thousand leagues away from it; no, no! I will not come to Paris; but Monsieur Tascher and I will send Josephine there to be married. This they did not tell Josephine, however. There was no need. She knew what was going on. She was too keen-sighted not to understand what all the long talks meant, between her father and mother. In an agony of grief at the idea of leaving the place where she and William had been so happy, to go among strangers and marry a man whom she had never even seen, she threw herself at her mother’s feet, and using the only argument which she thought would avail her, cried, “Oh, mamma, save me! save Maria’s sister!” At the mention of her lost and favorite daughter, Josephine’s mother fainted. Josephine’s father turned upon his daughter, and frowning as he pointed to her insensible mother, said, “Has, then, her precious life ceased to be dear to you?” Poor Josephine said no more. From that moment she resigned herself to her fate.
Short work was made of the preparations for the voyage to France; Josephine, meantime, walking for the last time under the trees, each one of which had some happy story to tell—each one of which seemed to her like a dear friend, from whom it were almost impossible to part. Now, the day came when the ship was to set sail. A large number of islanders had gathered upon the beach to wave hands and see her off. She had taken leave of her father and mother, and stepped on board the ship. Suddenly, a luminous meteor appeared in the heavens overhead, and by the aid of a telescope which the captain handed her, Josephine examined it. Then the captain told her, in great triumph, that “she was the cause of it! she—the future empress of France!” Then Josephine, for the first time, remembered the prophecy of the old mulatto woman, who had told the captain of it, and this was why the old sea-dog was in such glee at his good fortune in having the illustrious little empress that was to be, on board his ship. This phosphoric flame, called “St. Elmo’s fire,” was considered a good omen, and, at the time of their leaving, seemed to form a sort of wreath around the ship. But everybody seemed more interested in it than the poor, homesick Josephine, who could think only of the home she was leaving, and the unknown home to which she was going. The voyage proved very rough, and once they were in great danger; but the mulatto woman had promised them a “through ticket,” and, of course, they went through, right side up! A young Creole named Lucy accompanied Josephine, who was at this time only fifteen years old. You will laugh when I tell you that the future empress carried her doll with her, and that both she and Lucy used to play with them on the voyage. But you will stop laughing when I tell you that when Lucy turned her back, poor little Josephine used to talk to her doll about “William.” Poor child! When her foot touched the coast of France, her woman’s life began. The web was woven round her, and struggling was of no avail.
Madame Renardin bore away her beautiful niece in triumph to her own house, to show her to the rich husband they had selected for her. No more doll-playing for her; no more rose wreaths; but, instead, diamonds, and fashion, and frivolity, and an aching heart. Did “William” never come? Ah, yes; he came to Paris, spite of them all, to see his Josephine. He called at her Aunt Renardin’s, but of this they never told her. He continued, however, to write her a letter, in which he begged her to tell him why she had neglected him, which was conveyed to her by a servant, who was immediately dismissed for giving it to her. Then, for the first time, Josephine knew that William had been true to her, that he loved her still! But she had given her promise to her parents, and resolutely refused to see him. Poor Josephine! In her sixteenth year, she married, to please her friends, her dead sister’s lover, Monsieur Beauharnais. The marriage proved an unhappy one, through no fault of little Josephine’s, who most carefully endeavored to please the husband thus forced upon her.
Meanwhile the young Bonaparte was making rapid strides toward the fulfillment of the old Corsican herdsman’s prediction. On the death of Josephine’s husband, she really became, as you all know, the wife of the future emperor of France. How devotedly she performed her wifely duties to the great conqueror, you all know, and how cruelly the ambitious emperor set this noble woman aside, for the insipid little German princess who was the mother of his much-coveted child, the Duc de Reichstadt. In St. Helena, Bonaparte had plenty of time to think of his injustice toward the good, brave Josephine, who, forgetting all the misery he had caused her, would even then have lightened, by her presence, the dreary exile from which his baby-faced German wife had fled affrighted, back to the luxury of her father’s court. But death stepped in, and snatched from the selfish Bonaparte this great consolation of his last dreary hours. With his name on her lips, and her eyes fixed on his picture, which hung opposite her couch, she left all France weeping over her grave. You ask, what of the child—the little duke, whose birth this noble woman unselfishly rejoiced over, because it made Napoleon so happy? Ah! it is of him I would now tell you. This little duke, the child of so many hopes, did he, after all, sit upon the throne of France? God is just. We shall see.
The Emperor of Austria was the little duke’s maternal grandfather. It was to his palace the little, pale child was taken. It was the wish of this grandfather, who, notwithstanding all the stories told to the contrary, dearly loved the boy, to make a German prince of him. If it should prove that, as he grew up, he had a fondness for military life, he should follow it; still, he was to be kept away from agitating Frenchmen as much as possible, for reasons you will very well understand. The child was delicate, as I told you, and his grandfather petted him, and had the doctor to him, and, between you and me, I dare say that last might have been the reason he did not grow stronger. But, notwithstanding the pink spot on his pale cheek, he had the fiery spirit of his father, the great Napoleon. Oh! how he hated to be physicked, and how he pined to grow strong, that he might dash over the ground on a fiery horse, with staring eyes, big nostrils, and pawing hoofs, who would go straight through a cannon if he bade him, and come out at the other end, without losing a hair of his tail. But the more the poor fellow wanted to make a soldier of himself, the feebler he seemed to grow, till he could hardly sit upright on the horse, at the side of which might always be found his kind old grandfather, when not called away by his duties, saying kind things to his grandson, and trying to keep up his spirits. You ask, Where was his mother, Maria Louisa? Ah! you may well ask that. She was anywhere but where she ought to be; she could not be a good woman, even for the sake of her sick boy, in whose face she might have seen death written, had she stopped flirting long enough to take one good look at him. She was a miserable, bad woman, and if the little duke had any good qualities, she took no pains to encourage them. It was well he had a good, kind grandfather to love him, poor, fatherless child! The French people did not relish having Napoleon’s son at an Austrian court. Not they. They disliked Maria Louisa, the young duke’s mother, who never said such gracious, graceful things, as did the kind, whole-souled Josephine, who brought them all at her feet with one of her beautiful, sunny smiles. Maria Louisa was quite another thing, with her skim-milk face, as rigid when they saluted her, as if they hadn’t a drop of generous blood in their bodies. They needn’t have fretted lest the little duke should grow up like his mother, if he grew up at all; for I can tell you that all Austria could not get the Napoleonic fire out of his veins, nor, alas! poor fellow! disease either. All his thoughts were about his father. He knew not only every detail of his battles and campaigns, but all the peculiarities of his marshals and generals. “Oh!” said he, speaking of Waterloo, “I have often wondered my father did not follow my uncle, and perish at the head of his guards; what a magnificent close would that have been to his brilliant life. Ah! those perfidious English! why could they not have treated him as I know he would have treated their great Wellington, had the fortune of war thrown him into my father’s hands.” He was passionately fond of reading everything he could lay his hands on, pertaining to his father. He had, somehow or other, accumulated a perfect library of biographies concerning him. To Prince Metternich he once said, “The object of my life should be, to make myself worthy of my distinguished father; I hope to reach this point, and appropriate to myself his high qualities; taking care, however,” added he, with great good sense, “to avoid the rocks upon which he split.” Afterward he said, “How I hate this miserable, sickly body, which thus sinks under my will!” As he said this, there was a gleam of the eye, and compression of the lip, truly Napoleonic.
On the eighteenth of June, 1831, he was appointed lieutenant-colonel, and took command of the Hungarian regiment when in garrison at Vienna. An immense crowd gathered to witness the spectacle; but alas! every eye saw with what difficulty the poor young duke—fighting disease—sat upon his horse. So evident was his great weakness, spite of his unquenchable determination, that Dr. Margate, his physician, said to him, after he had gone through his drill with the soldiers, “Monseigneur, I desire you to remember that you have a will of iron in a body of glass; if you persist in this exercise, it will kill you.” The next day, the doctor considered it his duty to tell his grandfather the same thing. The frightened old emperor, turning to his beloved grandson, said, “You have heard what the doctor says; you must do this no more, but go directly to my summer palace at Schönbrunn, and take care of your health.” The disappointed duke bowed respectfully to his grandfather; but as he raised his head, he glanced angrily at the doctor, saying, “It is you, then, sir, who have put me under arrest!” A few weeks after this he was attacked with quick consumption. He grew weaker and weaker, as he was wheeled about the beautiful gardens of Schönbrunn, and he knew himself that he must soon die; his chief anxiety seemed now to be, whether he should be able to know his father in the other world. Poor Napoleon! how he had coveted the love of this son! How eagerly that unhappy exile at St. Helena had looked forward to it, and yet he was never to enjoy it; was not the unhappy Josephine avenged? And not only in that! Her grandson now sits upon the throne, to obtain an heir to which, the unhappy woman was thrust aside, for the foolish, weak daughter of the house of Hapsburg; while her child, of whom I have been telling you, has long since lain in his bronze coffin, under the church of the Capuchins, among the buried majesties of Austria.